On a cold December night in 2004, Chris Paul and the Wake Forest Demon Deacons made the challenging trip to Champaign, Ill., for the featured game of that season’s ACC/Big Ten Challenge.

The Deacons were ranked No. 1 when they entered Assembly Hall, but that designation wasn’t a burden for much longer after they were destroyed by the Illini, the 18-point margin not coming close to accurately portraying the devastation.

Afterward, one of the nation’s top college basketball analysts privately expressed his opinion that Wake was finished as an NCAA title contender.

“You don’t come all the way back from a beating like that,” he said, and Wake’s second-round exit from the 2005 NCAA Tournament validated his theory.

So what are we to think of North Carolina, which entered the season heavily favored to win it all, after the Tar Heels were dismembered by Florida State, 90-57, on Saturday afternoon?

“There is no facet of the game that we do not need to work on from free throws, to box outs, to guarding the ball, to help-side defense, to not turning it over—I mean every phase of the game,” UNC coach Roy Williams told reporters. “Florida State made us look like a bunch of junior high guys, and they were veterans.”

Williams took a lot of the blame himself, saying he did “the worst job of coaching I have ever done.” There might be some technical truth to that, since it was his most one-sided loss at Carolina, but more germane is that he’ll need to do one of his best coaching jobs to rescue the Heels from what occurred against the Seminoles.

There is a certain swagger a team must carry in order to win the six consecutive games necessary to claim the NCAA championship. No team in the past 20 years ever has absorbed a 30-point loss and recovered to win the title. The good news? The most lopsided defeat for any champion in that period was 26 points. The victim in that game? The 1993 North Carolina Tar Heels.

It’s never too late to learn

There were 2.5 seconds left in his team’s game against Northwestern when Michigan State Tom Izzo called timeout. No, it wasn’t to draw up scheme that would somehow gain possession for the Spartans and result in a seven-point play.

“I wanted to tell them, ‘Remember why we didn’t win this game.’ I wanted it to be fresh in their mind,” Izzo told reporters. “I wanted our freshman to know: This is unacceptable.”

The Spartans (15-3, 4-1) lost their first Big Ten game—snapping their 15-game winning streak—in an 81-74 decision Saturday afternoon at Northwestern’s Welsh-Ryan Arena.

The Spartans won the rebounding battle, but their defense yielded 50 percent shooting from the field and 8-of-17 3-point shooting. The Wildcats dissected the MSU defense so effectively they wound up shooting 29 free throws.

Izzo mentioned that he singled out senior guard Brandon Wood, a graduate transfer from Valparaiso who chose to fill a vacancy in the Spartans’ backcourt in part because he wanted to participate in the NCAA Tournament.

“You have got to man up in the big games,” Izzo said.

Izzo said he didn’t want to demean the Wildcats (12-5, 2-3), who took a huge step toward securing their first-ever NCAA Tournament berth with a second victory over an RPI top-five team. (Seton Hall was the first.) The Wildcats got 22 points from star forward John Shurna and a spectacular, unexpected 17-point effort from center Davide Curletti, who entered the game averaging 3.7.

“We weren’t good enough, but they were really good,” Izzo said. “Northwestern did a hell of a job.”

The winning streak that followed the Spartans’ season-opening losses to North Carolina and Duke had lifted them to No. 6 in the polls, but Izzo looks at a team that still is dependent on key freshmen such as wing Branden Dawson and guard Travis Trice and reasons that this still is a team that must work to be excellent.

Forward progress

Watching how Jimmy Graham nearly saved the New Orleans Saints’ season Saturday, we were reminded of this simple fact: Of the four tight ends selected for the 2012 Pro Bowl, three were serious college basketball players.

So why aren’t more teams scouting basketball courts to cover that position? Does the NFL think Graham, Antonio Gates and Tony Gonzalez are the only big, agile, athletically gifted fellows who’ve ever played Division I basketball?

Practice? Practice?

Sporting Newsfirst told you about Jarnell Stokes last summer, upon seeing him compete on the recruiting circuit at Nike’s Peach Jam tournament. Stokes was supposed to be a member of the Class of 2012, but when he wasn’t permitted to play high school ball because of a transfer ruling, he decided to graduate early and try to play in college this season. He chose Tennessee.

As impressive as he was in AAU-type games—we said he wore “a set of biceps that look as though they were borrowed from Karl Malone” and all but begged analysts to rank him higher—it seemed unlikely he would make an impact in the SEC with essentially five days of practice.

Even as believers, we seem to have underestimated him. In 17 minutes of his first college game, against one of the nation’s best teams, Kentucky, Stokes delivered nine points and four rebounds. There’ve been better college debuts this season, but none more remarkable.

Burden of the unbeaten

Anyone else notice Murray State’s games getting closer? Talk of an unbeaten season is growing louder. Its importance for Murray would be profound because that accomplishment likely would ensure an NCAA at-large bid and lead to a good seed. As is usually the case, however, this pursuit appears to be a burden. We saw it with the Memphis Tigers in 2008, when they took an unbeaten regular season all the way to the third week in February. We did not see it with Saint Joseph’s in 2004, which helps explain why the Hawks managed to win every regular-season game. Murray State beat Tennessee Tech, 82-74, on Saturday night, completing a stretch of three home games out of four. The three wins at the CFSB Center were achieved by an average margin of nine points. In four home games against Division I opponents before the New Year, the margin was 19.

That just seems not to be coincidental.

Three on the rise

San Diego State. Remember when people used to declare that Steve Fisher wasn’t much of a coach even though three of his first five seasons as coach ended in the NCAA championship game? Where are those people now? You know where Fisher is? Leading a 15-2 team that just won its eighth consecutive game, which owns victories over Arizona, Cal and now, UNLV.

Baylor PG Pierre Jackson. For the week, Jackson passed for 19 assists and shot 7-of-13 from 3-point range as the Bears won a tough road game at Kansas State and hit the century mark in a home win over Oklahoma State. Weren’t junior college recruits supposed to be out of style?

Massachusetts. It hasn’t been this good at UMass since John Calipari left town in the mid-'90s. Derek Kellogg remembers those days. He played for the Minutemen then and is restoring their glory with a 14-4 start that included Saturday’s 71-62 dismissal of Saint Joseph’s.

Three on the decline

Virginia Tech. Following a promising 11-3 non-league campaign that included two wins over Oklahoma State, and with an inviting early ACC schedule featuring trips to the two weakest teams in the league, the Hokies nonetheless have opened 0-3 in conference. They played Saturday without leading scorer Erick Green (knee) and lost at Boston College, 61-59. But folks, BC lost to Holy Cross, Boston U. and Rhode Island—teams with a combined 18-35 record.

DePaul. The Blue Demons’ 17-point loss at Louisville dropped them to 1-4 in the Big East. Over the past four seasons, they are 3-56 in Big East competition.

Saint Joseph’s. At the time former Hawks center Todd O’Brien wrote his piece for Sports Illustrated charging that St. Joe's was unfairly denying him the chance to play at Alabama-Birmingham as a graduate transfer, the Hawks were 8-3 and coming off a blowout of Big Five rival Villanova. Since that piece appeared, SJU is 4-3. It seems truer than ever: In a public enterprise, it makes no sense to stand on principle if the principle cannot be articulated.